Count Zero (Sprawl, #2)

by William Gibson

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos —Neruda

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.

a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

You could smell the lilacs, late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships. He masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought about cheerleaders.

Home was the next airport Hyatt.

And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of brooms, a woman’s body warm against his own.

He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fashion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of the previous five years.

The blue sheets were rucked across her hips, the sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her long thighs with diagonals of gold.

Hachi machi

Women’s sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void.

she lived alone in one of the ramshackle pontoon towns tethered off Redondo.

But talk seemed secondary to what there was between them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the thing. She squeezed his hand.

The multinationals he worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed . . .

Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf.

Fire 🔥 !

Now, in the white cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home. Then, grinning, he’d mount, enter, and find his own way there. Sometimes, then, he’d talk, long spirals of unfocused narrative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very little, but he’d learned to value what little she did say, and, always, she held him. And listened.

Basic dream here

The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way down the bay’s arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a detonation.

White screens, pale flawless pine—Tokyo’s austere corporate chic.

The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone could read,

The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble inlaid with an enameled keyboard. She raised lustrous eyes as Marly approached. Marly imagined the click and whirr of shutters, her bedraggled image whisked away to some far corner of Josef Virek’s empire.

Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well, fighting vertigo. She knew this place. She was in the Güell Park, Antonio Gaudí’s tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.

Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities.

for reasons so complex as to be entirely occult, the fact of my illness has never been made public.”

The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in. . . .”

“Credit me with a certain talent for obtaining desired results.”

I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

! Conservatives

“They want me that bad?” Conroy nodded. “It’s your show, Turner.” “Where’s Mitchell?” He opened the cylinder again and began to load the five remaining chambers. “Arizona. About fifty kilos from the Sonora line, in a mesatop research arcology.

It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.

Had Virek’s slim gold credit chip checked her out of her misery and into this hotel, where the towels were white and thick and scratchy? She was aware of a certain spiritual vertigo, as though she trembled at the edge of some precipice. She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water. Yes, my dear, it’s wet; yes, my child, it’s certainly warm, scented, scratchy-toweled. She stepped into the tub and lay down.

How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook?

Someone brown, slender, crouching somewhere in a strange bright dark full of stars and wind. But it slid away as his mind went for it.

Big Playground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies, catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous chicken-wire dishes.

And always the mingled beat from a million speakers, waves of music that pulsed and faded in and out of the wind.

Should he leave something for his mother? A note? “My ass,” he said to the room behind him, “out of here,” and then he was out the door and down the hall, headed for the stairs. “Forever,” he added, kicking open an exit door.

Marsha-momma’d get these two-hour fits of religion sometimes, come into Bobby’s room and sweep all his best garbage out and gum some God-awful self-adhesive hologram up over his bed. Maybe Jesus, maybe Hubbard, maybe Virgin Mary, it didn’t much matter to her when the mood was on her. It used to piss Bobby off real good, until one day he was big enough to walk into the front room with a ballpeen hammer and cock it over the Hitachi; you touch my stuff again and I’ll kill your friends, Mom, all of ’em. She never tried it again. But the stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.

“Hey,” Bobby said, “you know that could be some real bad shit? Give you cancer and stuff.” “Go lick a dog’s ass till it bleeds,” the first kid down the rope advised him, as they flicked their grapple loose, coiled their line, and dragged the canister around the corner of the dumpster and out of sight.

“My man,” the Dean responded languidly, his left cheek distended by a cud of resin. “The Count, baby”—as an aside to his girl—“Count Zero Interrupt.”

He knew there was a lot he didn’t know about the matrix, but he’d never heard of anything that weird . . . You got ghost stories, sure, and hotdoggers who swore they’d seen things in cyberspace, but he had them figured for wilsons who jacked in dusted; you could hallucinate in the matrix as easily as anywhere else .

He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.

the hovercraft sank into its inflated apron bag as they came to a halt.

Turner looked up at the bowl of sky, limitless, the map of stars. Strange how it’s bigger this way, he thought, and from orbit it’s just a gulf, formless, and scale lost all meaning. And tonight he wouldn’t sleep, he knew, and the Big Dipper would whirl round for him and dive for the horizon, pulling its tail with it.

“Yes,” Andrea was saying, “I do see it.” She was peering into the hologram of the box Marly had first seen in Virek’s construct of Gaudi’s park.

The dark was full of honeycomb patterns the color of blood. Everything was warm. And soft, too, mostly soft. “What a mess,” one of the angels said, her voice far off but low and rich and very clear. “We should’ve clipped him out of Leon’s,” the other angel said. “They aren’t gonna like this upstairs.” “Must’ve had something in this big pocket here, see? They slashed it for him, getting it out.” “Not all they slashed, sister. Jesus. Here.” The patterns swung and swam as something moved his head. Cool palm against his cheek. “Don’t get any on your shirt,” the first angel said. “Two-a-Day ain’t gonna like this. Why you figure he freaked like that and ran?”

The soap had been running continuously since before he was born, the plot a multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for tension and thrust.

Plot

This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend.

the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room.

White, white, he remembered his head exploding years away, pure white grenade in that cool-wind desert dark. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see. Just white.

Meantime, I’m going to click your sensorium up to audio and full visual so you can get into being here.

back through the red honeycombs, to the dream room where the black girl sliced pizza for her children.

Pye, the doctor, who’d been careful to explain that he wasn’t a doctor, just someone who “helped out sometimes,” had settled back on a torn barstool in his makeshift surgery, peeled off his bloody green gloves, lit a menthol cigarette, and solemnly advised Bobby to take it real easy for the next week or so.